Bobbi Gibb Marathon Sculpture Project

Joan Benoit Samuelson and a long list of Boston Marathon champions have united to form the Bobbi Gibb Marathon Sculpture Project. The project’s goal is to raise funds to erect a sculpture of Gibb on the Boston Marathon course.

Dressed in her brother's hooded sweatshirt and Bermuda shorts to disguise her femininity, Roberta Gibb hid in a forsythia bush on Hopkinton Street near the start line of the Boston Marathon.

Apr 15, 2016

Mother, Artist, Author, Runner, Attorney, ...

While many people know Bobbi Gibb as the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, few people know her as an artist. Bobbi Gibb's zest for life and natural curiosity show up in the many hats she wears: artist, mother, scientific researcher for neurodegenerative diseases, attorney, athlete, author and speaker, to name a few.

Musings

In 26.2 Essays, Bobbi applies the insights she developed through decades of living, loving, and running to a multitude of human endeavors, including economics, politics, religion, sociology, and science. Each mile of the Marathon serves as a trigger for another essay just as the marathon serves as a powerful metaphor for our journey through life.

In the spring of 1966, 23-year-old Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb made a ripple as the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. In fact, it was the first race she ever ran. There were no trainers or even women’s running shoes at the time.

Her passion may be running yet contemporary artist and sculptor Bobbi Gibb has never run from anything in her life. In fact, her existence is a series of running toward, well, everything, as fast as humanly possible. She began running at age four “and never stopped.”

With little left to prove on the roads after 1968, Gibb turned her attention to academics and art. She has had a lifelong and continuing interest in neuroscience, especially Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), which claimed a close friend a decade ago. She also sculpts and paints. In 1984, her sculpture was awarded to the first three finishers in the first U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials for women, famously won by Joan Benoit.

Some of her paintings—colorful swirling abstracts—will be made public for the first time this spring.